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Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

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Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#471

Post by Dylan16807 »

digging wrote: post #111
phoronixrly wrote: post #34

With regards to the end of the article. > Can I work for a bad company and still be a good person? > No. https://apenwarr.ca/log/20201121

And pretty much every company is bad. But this is a wrong answer because the question is actually nonsense. The answer to "What happens when you move faster than light" is not "nothing", it is undefined because the question is invalid. Asking if a person or a company is good or bad isn't a question that can ever have a well-defined answer: the answers we give are rounded according to our own values. To get more speci…

> the answers we give are rounded according to our own values

I agree with this entirely.

And rounding does not change the answer in most situations.

Something that isn't well-defined can still be mostly-defined.

I have no idea what the point of that strawman is in your last paragraph. It doesn't make sense with or without rounding. Maybe if you round every single value to infinity, but that's not what "rounding" normally means...

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#472

Post by plorkyeran »

fnfjfk wrote: post #466
lilyball wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flying requires an ID. Attending a concert should not. Any solution that is solved by "simple, just require an ID" is not a solution.

How are you getting into shows without presenting ID for age? Every (well, every legal...) venue I've been to in NYC cards to see if you are 21.

I have never had to show ID to get into a concert other than tiny shows at bars. Every larger venue around here (SF) I’ve been to checks IDs to get a wrist band which lets you buy drinks, but you can just skip that if you aren’t drinking.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#473

Post by lotsoweiners »

reddalo wrote: post #223
padthai wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I have flight tickets autoupdate when there is a delay.

I've only seen the flight data change, not the code itself.

Even that isn’t updated correctly very often. There is always at least a gate change that doesn’t update the tickets in my Apple wallet.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#474

Post by lotsoweiners »

mattmaroon wrote: post #306
tptacek wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I'm just reacting because TOTP is like the textbook example of a system designed to work without interactive access to a networked resource. The whole as TM designed it has crappy affordances, but you could fix that without breaking the design.

Ah, yeah. I’m just hoping the justice dept breaks them up and ticket sales move to something like the airline model.

Why though? Lord knows I hate Ticketmaster as much as everyone else but “airline model” sounds fucking terrible. I hope I never see the day where I’m removing belts and shoes to get into a concert.

To be fair though I always get at least somewhat reasonable concert prices by doing presale. Sign up for the artist’s “presale club” and/or get the credit cards that have presale as a perk. Get in queue ahead of time. You won’t have to deal with the dynamic pricing/public sale shenanigans that we hear about. On Reddit I often see people complaining about paying at least 2x what I paid for similar tickets.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#475

Post by TylerE »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #438
TylerE wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even have to use the app. You can just visit the ticketmaster website and add it to apple wallet straight from there. Can do it months in advance, too.

The website comes up in Safari, and is scannable from there. Don’t need to add to wallet. I used box office wifi to get text and follow url. I never asked for this BTW, would rather have a paper ticket.

The advantage to using wallet is that you don’t need working WiFi at the event. Everything you need to get in is stored locally.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#476

Post by dfadsadsf »

yellowapple wrote: post #297
drewg123 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last minute / next day fares have traditionally been far more expensive than 3 week advance, and that was intended to impact business travel more than leisure. If there was a 3rd party marketplace for airline tickets, last minute tickets would not be nearly as expensive and the airlines would make far less money. Consider an example where we have a business traveler "Bob" and a leisure traveler "Larry". Bob needs to…

Okay, but how many business flights are actually last-minute like that? Whenever I've flown for work reasons the tickets were bought at least a week in advance, and usually 3+ weeks in advance. Likewise, there are plenty of non-business flights booked last-minute like that, too - like, as a personal example, needing to book a same-night flight to help a family member drive cross-country with her kids and personal bel…

I almost always book tickets for business travel 1-3 day before the trip. I am completely price insensitive (I do not care if my employer pays $100 or $400 for the ticket), my schedule is hard to predict ahead of time (if there are no important meetings on Monday, I will fly on Monday. If something important pops up I may fly on Sunday or on Tuesday). Downside is smaller seat selection (I mitigate by always checking if aisle seat available before booking) and sometimes convenient flights sell out.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#477

Post by deathanatos »

joquarky wrote: post #235
probably_wrong wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad we cleared that up. Now all that remains is a good, measurable definition of what a bad company is.

As one grows older, they may find that not everything in reality can be quantified or put into words. And trying to objectify value judgements is another whole area of contention that inevitably leads to itself.

I realize that.

But the point of reading a blog post would be to learn something insightful, to see the reasoning or argument by which the poster came to this particular conclusion. Hopefully with some consideration that I'd not thought of before.

This boils a complicated question with nuance and problems and facets of debate into a rather vapid "I like this answer." of a post. It's not worth anything: I come away from it no richer than when I came.

Like, trivially, someone could write the opposite answer on another blog. And whose answer is right? (They of course need not even bother actually writing it out. A "right" answer is created by argument, not spilled ink.)

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#478

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

immibis wrote: post #181
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That requires a single source of truth for which names go with which tickets. Which is going to be a problem if tickets need to be transferred in contexts where users don't have internet access (but they do have local connectivity between devices) or in contexts where the venue doesn't have internet access. Or in cases where the single source of truth might be vulnerable to attack or doesn't have the resources to han…

> Which is going to be a problem if tickets need to be transferred in contexts where users don't have internet access (but they do have local connectivity between devices) or in contexts where the venue doesn't have internet access. You know as well as I do that TicketMaster won't allow any of that, because it means they miss out on selling another ticket.

I was operating under the assumption that the goal was to replace TicketMaster with an open protocol.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#479

Post by amar1729 »

leptons wrote: post #221
fooqux wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programmers being analogous to wizards or martial artists made more sense back when one used to need to train years or decades to become one. With age comes wisdom. There has been a lot of good that came from making coding more accessible; I'm not trying to gatekeep. But I do think that this is one instance where the outcome is worse. The martial arts masters still unquestionably exist among us. It's just that they'r…

>Programmers being analogous to wizards or martial artists made more sense back when one used to need to train years or decades to become one. You can be a shitty wizard with only one year of training, same goes for programmers.

that's kind of exactly OP's point. you can get hired and call yourself a "programmer" after a year of training today ... that was not true in quite the same way 30/40 years ago. and we're in agreement that someone with a year of training is probably not all that good.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#480

Post by [deleted] »

cortesoft wrote: post #10

> There’s no risk that your ticket won’t get you in Isn’t this not true? The risk with printable tickets is that a seller could sell it to multiple people, who all print it out, but then only the first person who uses it can get in? Even if the venue doesn’t check to see if a ticket has already been used, only one person can sit in the actual seat.

[deleted]
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